LadyEsquire wrote:If I ran my household budget the Romney way, I would pay three times as much as everyone else for the same services just because I could and don't need to try to be efficient.

Whats your pt? If you can afford to do there is no problem. The administration is spending money it cant afford like a drunken sailor. That IS a problem!

I would make the point that the money is there to cover much of the deficit. All Congress needs is to find the political will to access it. The deficit is largely a direct result of allowing, by lower taxation, ten years of opportunity for the so-called "job creators" to create millions of good paying jobs providing their own income tax revenue streams.

Time for those with the money to fish or cut bait.

Now is the time for the rich to pay back their job deficit on the one hand, and the budgetary deficit on the other. They do have, at last count, $5 trillion of idle cash sitting around.

Give them a choice: Jobs or taxes. Either they start creating some new taxpayers, or we will make sure that they start paying the tax for them.

Corporations Hold Enough Cash To Pay Off 1/3 Of The National Debt

Having perhaps $5 trillion sitting on their books is dramatically more money than they really need. So much money that it may be subject to a special tax if it weren’t for a little loophole. Perhaps I should elaborate.

There’s a line in the tax code that says if a company has too much cash then that cash can be taxed. The idea being that a company is holding cash that actually belongs to the shareholders. This is usually distributed as a dividend. By imposing a tax on the cash the government is forcing the company to distribute the cash. The government has a vested interest of course because when that money is distributed the shareholders will report it as income which is then taxed.

However, there is a loophole that keeps the IRS from enforcing this on some of the money corporations have made. If the money was made overseas and it stays there, it won’t be taxed. It can’t be taxed as income, and can’t be taxed under the cash penalty.

So how come profits of an American corporation made overseas aren’t taxed?

We have companies with billions they can’t use and an economy in need of some extra investment. These corporations say they’ll use the money to create jobs if we give them a tax holiday, but there’s no guarantee of that.

Where are the US jobs? Ask the corporate cash hoardersCorporate tax breaks won't boost the economy. If unemployment is to fall, giant companies must invest in job creation2 August 2012

This time around, it would be refreshing if the pundit-political class considered a radical but obvious idea: tapping the multitrillion-dollar stockpiles of corporate cash currently sitting on the sidelines and benefiting no one. Compulsive hoarding is unhealthy for individuals. It's even worse for whole economies.

The sorry facts are these: job growth is still half of what is needed to keep up with population growth. Meanwhile, more than 14% of the US workforce is unemployed, underemployed or discouraged from looking for work. State and local governments are broke, and the fight over federal deficits has turned into an all-out war in Congress.

The only thing that will bring jobs back is more consumer demand. Demand comes from middle and working-class people spending money. That becomes a lot harder when you don't have a job, are afraid of losing the one you have, or are earning less than you used to for the same work. Despite rising productivity, labor's share of the national income in the US has dropped to the lowest point in recorded history.

It turns out that US-based mega-corporations are hoarding cash. How much cash? Record sums. It's about $1.73tn in US assets, according to the Federal Reserve – 50% more than they held in 2007. When you count worldwide holdings of US companies, the figure is a staggering $5.1tn, estimates Reuters' David Cay Johnston. Apple alone has $117bn.

Banks are also stockpiling cash; they're sitting on more than $1.5tn in excess reserves in the US.

Not only are mega-companies not creating enough decent jobs with this cash, they continue to offshore work and underpay workers. Many are not even rewarding investors or accelerating their growth with the money, thereby causing harm to themselves, according to a recent survey by Ernst & Young. Economists also say that cash hoarding is blocking a recovery in Europe.

To be sure, the purpose of these companies – and of capitalism itself – is to create profits, not jobs. But as the Great Depression and the Great Recession have demonstrated – and as a famous philosopher-economist once said – capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. It's impoverishing the very workers and consumers it needs to expand in the US.

Of course, the question will arise: how can we make quarterly profits-obsessed corporations tap their vast reserves to invest and create jobs to serve their long-term interests? I don't know. But knowing where the cash is in this supposedly cash-strapped country is a start.

We shouldn't forget that the supreme court demonstrated recently that it's quite open to the idea of mandates. Wouldn't it make sense to mandate job creation when corporate cash levels reach a certain level? Or, for a more modest start, mandate corporations receiving taxpayer subsidies to create jobs? At the very least, the US should enforce Section 531 of the Internal Revenue Service code, which authorises taxing companies' excessive accumulated earnings, as Cay Johnston points out.

"The president has no direct impact on the program, and one could hardly call these devices "Obama Phones," as the e-mail author does. This specific program, SafeLink, started under President George Bush, with grants from an independent company created under President Bill Clinton, which was a legacy of an act passed under President Franklin Roosevelt, which was influenced by an agreement reached between telecommunications companies and the administration of President Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson Phones, anyone?"

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”― George W. Bush

I realize that Republicans have a problem recognizing it, but it's called "Sarcasm". Republicans have been calling it an "Obamaphone" for almost 4 years. No amount of facts seem to penetrate their idiocy!

Max M. Haiflich, Jr.Free = no regulations = survival of the fittest = SomaliaSo in summation, the Conservative Republican’s Political Platform is, LIES, MORE LIES, OUTRAGIOUS LIES, and DAMN STUPID LIES, because we represent the word of GOD.